USEC_OFFICER @ Thu Mar 11, 2010 8:08 pm wrote:
Now that we do know that in fact, we can all do the program, can we talk about the blog? And why most graduates can't do this in 10-15 minutes?
It's probably largely how CS is taught. Last year, when we were learning Turing, I felt like there was a lot of this is how you do this, and not so much this is why you want to do this, and this is how it works with that. I don't imagine this would continue so much into a university level, and the teacher I have this year does a better job with the why. What I mean can be summed up pretty well (by changing the context) with this passage out of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
Quote:
He took up his pen again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
This seems to be, in my experience anyway, the problem with a lot of elementary and high school classes.
I went to a French immersion school until less than a month into grade six, when I moved and started going to an English school. Going through non immersion French classes until grade nine, using grade three to four textbooks, it amazed me that a lot of the class could not string together complete sentences and carry a conversation in French, that was something the majority of my class could do after kindergarden. It was not their fault though (of course, it didn't help that no one, not even myself wanted to be there), most classes were learning verb conjugations and exceptions, and not actually talking in French. It's funny, though, you can ask nearly anyone who is a native English speaker to conjugate 'to be', and they'll stumble over it, or not get it at all, but they can use it in any sentence just fine, it's because you don't learn a new language by memorizing verb exceptions, but there is such an emphasis on that for some reason.
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andrew: Don't worry, no one who hasn't spent time using functional languages would think that's a good idea to use
